NBN Co’s need for speed

The company has kicked off a new ‘Focus on Fast’ marketing campaign and will offer more capacity and pricing rebates.

NBN Co has earmarked more than $2 billion to network investments over the next three years to benefit residentialand business customers living and working in regional areas of Australia.

Hello and welcome to The Download, The Australian’s technology blog for the latest tech news.

David Swan 5pm: SalesTribe helps monday.com scale

Australian career transition management platform SalesTribe has helped US tech unicorn monday.com expand in Australia, with the monday.com team looking to grow rapidly over the next 12 months.

Speaking to The Australian, SalesTribe founder Graham Hawkins said his company helps other businesses grow by deep-diving into their strategy, operations and culture. The company then equips its clients with the right sales teams.

“Once we truly understood monday.com’s culture and business objectives we were able to get very clear about specifics around role criteria and what type of person would be required in order to ‘do the job’ not just ’get the job’.

“Once we identified the key senior leaders, Dean Swan and Brock Fisher, to build the local business around, the rest was easy. From our point of view, the main reason that this partnership works so well is that both companies are 100 per cent aligned culturally and both have a forward-looking view of how business should be done.”

SalesTribe co-founder Graham Hawkins. Source: Supplied.

Mr Hawkins said his top tip for landing partnerships with the likes of monday.com was to ‘build your brand’.

“Omnichannel visibility, track-record and reputation are all critical in this new era, where everyone looks for independent advocacy, proof points and reviews before they ever bother engaging with you,” he said.

“Of course, having a trusted brand is predicated on first having ‘raving fans’ – customers who are so delighted with your product or service that they happily tell others about the great CX they had with your business. Success today is all about proof points, and trusted recommendations and both are derived from having some ‘raving fans’.

The executive added that we now live in a world where employee engagement and culture are critical components to business success.

“Your ability to attract and retain talent can make or break your business, and this is precisely why we are cultivating a “Tribe” of salespeople with our platform, who are all in various stages of being ‘Screened, Approved, Trained and Certified’ – meaning that we have a detailed understanding of our candidates – their competencies, ambitions, strengths and weaknesses,” he said.

“The single biggest challenge facing almost every business today is how to ‘get attention’ and cut through all the noise, and then ‘initiate a conversation’ with an educated buyer who no longer wants to meet you in person.”

David Swan 4.30pm: NBN Co’s need for speed

Ahead of a senate estimates hearing tonight, NBN Co has launched a new campaign to encourage retailers to sell higher speed broadband plans, along with rebates and added free connectivity.

The campaign, dubbed Focus on Fast, comes amid additional CVC data inclusions on NBN’s 100/40 Mbps plans from December 1 2020, as NBN’s extra COVID capacity comes to an end.

The company’s chief customer officer Brad Whitcomb said that in order to assist retailers’ transition to the additional data inclusions and pricing rebates, NBN Co will continue to essentially offer internet retailers some additional CVC capacity at no extra cost.

“We are pleased to support internet retailers and their customers during the pandemic as more people work, study and stream entertainment content at home. The NBN network continues to perform well and by offering the additional COVID-19 CVC Credit to internet retailers at no extra cost for nine months, we have provided an important shock absorber to the industry. This has given internet retailers time to adjust to growth in data demand,” chief customer officer Brad Whitcomb said in a statement.

“Increasing numbers of customers are choosing to upgrade to higher speed plans, and these measures provide additional value and incentives for retailers to help customers to upgrade to higher speed plans that may be better suited to their needs.

“Higher speed bundle discounts come with more CVC inclusions, which helps deliver improved performance for those customers while also adding to the pool of included CVC capacity that is available for retailers to use across their entire customer base.

“The offers we are working to introduce on 1 December 2020 play to the increasing strength and capabilities of the national broadband network to meet customer demand for higher speed services.

“To provide the industry with greater cost certainty over the critical summer holiday period, and to assist the transition to our new CVC inclusions and wholesale pricing rebates, we will continue to provide eligible retailers with some continued CVC financial support through December and January.”

Chris Griffith 1.30pm: Sony announces COVID-safe ceiling mic for meetings and classes

Capturing the speech of people at large meetings can be tricky. The conventional way has been a handheld mic shared between participants, handed to you by an assistant when it’s your turn to speak or ask a question.

With the pandemic, the idea of sharing a handheld mic in a room is not a COVID safe practice. Yet there’s an increased need to capture audio at meetings where participants may be dialling in remotely as well as physically at the location.

To address this concern, Sony has released a beam forming microphone, a big round device that you attach to the ceiling. Sony sees it as especially useful in classrooms and lecture theatres. It says the MAS-A100 has a dual channel output for simultaneous recording of a wide area to capture both the speaker and students’ voices.

Capabilities include what Sony calls “an intelligent feedback reducer” which can extract speech sound while suppressing unwanted feedback to achieve clarity. It sounds similar to the background noise capability found on noise cancelling headsets.

You can install multiple MAS-A100s to cover large areas.

It’s another example of tech being shaped to address the new normal situations of the pandemic.

The MAS-A100 is available now for $3999 AUD.

David Swan 12pm: The Aussie company taking on Slack

Melbourne-based project management platform Hassl has announced its latest wellbeing feature, as the company aims to give Slack and Trello a run for their money.

Hassl, which offers project management, file and messaging capabilities in one platform, has teamed up with mindfulness researcher Dr Stephen McKenzie to launch a module which prompts its users to take 20 to 90 second breaks, twice a day.

Lauren Crystal, Hassl co-founder, told The Australian that her start-up has more than 300 active teams on its platform, with usage up around 25 per cent since March.

Hassl’s client list includes Harvard University, American Airlines, IBM and Citibank.

Hassl co-founder Lauren Crystal. Source: Supplied.

“For too long it‘s been taboo in the business world to actually take your allocated one-hour lunch break, let alone smaller breaks for the benefit of your wellbeing. As wellness is so close to our hearts, we knew it was time to change this unfair reality for our customers and businesses worldwide – for teams set up at home as well as those teams transitioning back to the office,” she said.

“Company leaders need to encourage their teams to take time out of their work schedules to look after their long-term wellbeing, as the benefits are invaluable for both individuals and businesses themselves. The proof is in the productivity pudding.”

Ms Crystal added that her company encourages 2pm ‘stretch clubs’, in which the team dials in remotely and stretches together to boost morale, as well as promote healthy habits.

“With our own Melbourne-based team working under tough restrictions we began to notice how important micro-breaks were to staying productive, and to be frankly, stay sane. To pause and be aware of how you’re feeling both physically and mentally,” she said.

“While the feature is a direct response to COVID-19, I believe wellness in the workplace will be part of the new normal. In the long-term, the rhythm of everyday business in Australia is changing, and if we’re going to keep remote working companies will want to ensure staff wellbeing is still a priority.”

The company’s platform for teams starts at $6 per user per month and is available at its website.

Chris Griffith 8.50am: Google antitrust lawsuit welcomed in Europe

The US Department of Justice lawsuit against Google is being applauded in Europe which had led the fighting against the tech giant’s monopolistic behaviour.

Laura Petrone, senior analyst in the Thematic Research Team at GlobalData, says the lawsuit is a watershed moment for big tech regulation.

“ There is now a consensus on both sides of the Atlantic in favour of tackling data monopolies,” she says. “The EU has been leading antitrust investigations against Google for almost a decade, fining the company $9bn in just two years for both antitrust and data privacy violations. Conversely, the search giant has so far faced less scrutiny in the US, with limited fines.

Google's offices in downtown Manhattan. Picture: AFP

“This lawsuit is a testbed for judging anti-competitive behaviour based on service quality regarding data privacy and data protection. The EU antitrust regulators have already moved towards this approach in several investigations against Big Tech. Now it appears that US authorities are following the same path.

She says a wave of regulation will hit big tech, with both antitrust and data privacy regulators taking an increasingly hard line.

However, The Wall Street Journal reports that some of Google’s competitors say the EU’s decisions were too late and too weakly enforced to have a real impact. Maybe, but the US comes from a position of having done little itself about this issue until now.

One question is whether Google and parent Alphabet will use the courts to delay any US-initiated regulation for years. Will attempts to reign in Google be delayed indefinitely by a battery of never ending legal battles? Technology corporation Oracle’s legal fight with Google has been in the US courts for ten years with no final outcome in sight.

Oracle executive vice-president Ken Glueck recently explained Google’s tactics in this way. “Google has mastered the art of winning by kicking the can down the road,” he said in a blog post. “It can afford to play the long game. Deny every claim, appeal any adverse decision, run out the clock on every opponent — including government regulators.

“Even nominal ‘losses’ for Google are really wins: It can appeal fines and courtroom setbacks for years while its market power continues to grow and competitors disappear.”

Hopefully regulation that comes out of this antitrust suit wont disappear through years of court cases.

Oracle has a strong view about how the US government should approach this. “Europe’s lesson for Washington is to go for the jugular — to require changes to Google’s business that make a real difference in the market,” says Thomas Vinje, a partner at law firm Clifford Chance who represented FairSearch, a lobby group led by Oracle in the EU’s case against Google. He made his comments to The Wall Street Journal.

The danger is not to see much needed regulation thwarted by legal manoeuvring and complexity.

7.50am: Quibi calls it quits

Quibi Holdings is shutting itself down, according to people familiar with the matter, a crash landing for a once-high-flying entertainment start-up that raised $US1.75bn in capital.

The streaming service has been plagued with problems since it launched in April, facing lower-than-expected viewership, disappointing download numbers and a lawsuit from a well-capitalised foe.

More: The promise that was Quibi.

Rob Post, Quibi chief technology officer, talks about Quibi's "turnstyle" technology for short-form video streaming for mobile devices in January. Picture: AFP

On Wednesday, Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg called investors to tell them he is shutting the service down, some of the people said.

Quibi’s shutdown marks a disappointing turn of events for Mr. Katzenberg, who pitched the streaming service as a revolutionary new entrant to the videostreaming wars.

The service served up shows in 5-minute to 10-minute “chapters” formatted to fit a smartphone screen, targeting subscribers who wanted entertainment in a hurry. It was primarily aimed at mobile viewers, but the coronavirus pandemic forced would-be subscribers away from the kinds of on-the-go situations Quibi executives envisioned for its users.

Quibi attracted blue-chip advertisers including PepsiCo and Walmart. and Anheuser-Busch InBev SA, securing about $US150m in ad revenue in the run-up to its launch. Those deals came under strain earlier this year amid lower-than-expected viewership for Quibi’s shows, prompting advertisers to defer their payments.

In recent weeks, Quibi hired a restructuring firm to evaluate its options, the people said. The firm recommended the options to the board of directors this week, a list that included shutting the company down.

Quibi is holding a call with its investors later Wednesday (US time) to update them on the status of the company, some of the people said.

The Information earlier reported that Mr. Katzenberg told people in the media industry he may have to shut down the company.

The decision to hire the reorganisation firm came after starting a process to sell the company, The Wall Street Journal reported. Quibi pitched suitors including Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal on a sale, according to people familiar with the matter, but would-be buyers were put off by the fact that Quibi doesn’t own many of the shows it puts on its platform.

NBCUniversal declined to comment.

Mr. Katzenberg and chief executive Meg Whitman raised about $1.75 billion from high-profile investors including Walt Disney Co, NBCUniversal and AT & T Inc.’s WarnerMedia. The service streamed original shows with stars such as Anna Kendrick, Christoph Waltz and Liam Hemsworth, which garnered mixed reviews.

One of Quibi’s big selling points was its library of shows that could only be watched on users’ mobile phones. That feature proved to be a liability when the pandemic struck, sending viewers into their homes to watch shows on TV. Quibi eventually allowed subscribers to watch its shows on their TVs.

It struggled to attract subscribers after spending heavily on original programming. It said the pandemic has been the primary cause of its struggles, but its $US4.99 per-month subscription fee and an already crowded marketplace also are seen as factors for its difficulties.

Quibi is also fighting a legal battle with video technology firm Eko over who should get credit for the company’s videostreaming technology. The lawsuit, which was filed earlier this year, is ongoing.

In recent weeks, Quibi hired a restructuring firm to evaluate its options, the people said. The firm recommended the options to the board of directors this week, a list that included shutting the company down.

Quibi is holding a call with its investors later Wednesday (US time) to update them on the status of the company, some of the people said.

The Wall Street Journal